Report: Iran forcefully deporting Afghan refugees

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Iran is forcefully deporting Afghans by the thousands in violation of its international obligation to protect refugees, said a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday.

The report included stories of fathers deported without being given a chance to tell the families they leave behind. It said a 12-year old boy was left without money at the border, forced to beg for bus fare to Afghanistan.

Millions of Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan in the 1980s to flee a bloody anti-Communist insurgency. At the peak of the war, roughly 5 million refugees lived in Pakistan and nearly 4 million in Iran. Currently the Human Rights Watch estimates about 2 million Afghans still live in Iran as unregistered refugees — some having returned to Afghanistan only to come back once again to Iran driven back by lack of jobs and a deteriorating security situation in their homeland.

But Iran has refused to register many of them, said Faraz Sanei, Human Rights Watch researcher for Middle East and North Africa. Roughly another 840,000 Afghans live in Iran as registered refugees.

Senei said the report's authors spent more than one year on Afghanistan's western border with Iran interviewing refugees as they straggled across the border, some telling horrific tales of being beaten and abused.

Families have often been broken up. Two teenage Afghan girls were arrested in the Iranian holy city of Qom, the report said. The reason: One of them was wearing pink sneakers. When their father and a fiancé of one of the girls came to help them, the police discovered they were Afghans and immediately deported all four of them. Their mother and three other children were left behind in Iran.

"The most serious concerns that we have are the many undocumented Afghans in Iran who, when they are deported, go through some very very serious abuses during the deportation process," Senei told reporters in the Afghan capital.

There was no immediate comment from the Iranian government, which rarely comments on human rights reports.

"As the Iranian government ratchets up the pressure on Afghans to leave, Afghanistan's deteriorating economic and security situation increases the dangers for returnees," he said. The report urged Iran to set up reception centers for unaccompanied children, provide greater assistance to deported Afghans, and end the abuses of Afghan refugees and migrants.

Violence continues in Afghanistan. Also on Wednesday, the district police chief of Marjah in southern Afghanistan's restive Helmand province was ambushed and killed. His bodyguard was wounded, said a police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.